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5 widely unknown Mac OS X features.

I love Apple computers, they are in my opinion the best quality materials with the best Operating System. Based on unix, Mac OSX has tons of features, is very secure, and is intuitive and easy to use. But their are so many options and configurations it is easy to get lost or simple overlook some pretty cool features. I will keep adding more to this list so feel free to bookmark it or add it to your favorite social site using the Sharing link above.

Make your mouse scrolling wheel slower

Sometimes while reading a large article on a website you use your mouse scroll wheel which goes way past your spot and you have to search to get back to the place you left off. It is a pain and can ruin your concentration and train of thought. Some mice come with software to adjust the tracking and scrolling speed, but usually they only run on Windoze!

Well, Apple thought of that and if you hold command (apple) while scrolling the page will go much slower than the default speed.

Zoom into anything

Apple has a really cool feature which allows you to zoom into anything with just a few keystrokes. It is a great way to get full screen video on sources that don’t allow it (I am looking at you, Quicktime Non-Pro).

Simultaneously press Command (Apple) + Option (Alt) + 8 to toggle zooming on and off; Then to zoom in use Command (Apple) and Option (Alt) and = (the equal and + sign) to zoom out use Command (Apple) and Option (Alt) and - (the minus and hyphen sign)

Make your mac a web server

This was one of my favorite things before I had purchased hosting. This allows you to use all the power of the Apache Web Server to host html, css, and images to others through the internet. Install MAMP for PHP and MySQL and you have a functional development server.

Go to System Preferences and Choose Sharing. Then turn on Personal Web Sharing.

Quickly find files

What used to be Command + F (Find), then Sherlock, has turned into spotlight. Spotlight is great at finding stuff (if you have a powerful computer if not, turn it off since it is a memory hog. But what if I don’t want to search through every folder or scroll all the way to the top right?

Go to System Preferences and Choose Spotlight. From there you can choose which folders spotlight will search through by default. You can also create your own keystroke commands to highlight the Spotlight search field or bring up a Search box. They default as Command and Space or Command and Option and Space, accordingly.

Make animations slow motion

This is not so much as useful as it is cool, but is definitely one of my favorite features and sure to impress people who do not own a mac. You can see this in action in a movie with all the cool effects.

Hold shift while minimizing windows, collapsing or expanding a stack from the dock, or anything else that is animated in OSX. Leave comments if you find any cool ones I may have overlooked.